Archive for World War I

The concept for Sucker Punch, whacked as it is, is actually pretty decent. The movie is also gorgeous and stylized. Yet… it just doesn’t really work at any rational level. Part Kill Bill, part Pan’s Labyrinth, part Inception, part Sin City, part video game cut scene, this film is all CGI glitz and fetishistic style. It’s also worth noting that the writer/director, Zach Snyder, brought us those other style over substance “classics”: Watchmen and 300.

As to the plot. Wait, I can’t really use that word because as I’ve discussed at length before plot is the action created by opposition to the protagonist’s desire. The characterization in this film is about as solid as a whiff of gunpowder and we have only the most basic desire: escape. The film opens with a comic book style summary of the setup: girl has been orphaned, framed by her evil step-father, committed to a mental asylum (in the late 40s), and scheduled for a lobotomy. From this grim — but actually dramatically interesting — setup we devolve into a series of nested fantasies.

Now don’t get me wrong. I love reality bending films. Pan’s Labyrinth is my favorite film of the last decade. They’re just hard to get right and it’s key to overlap and contrast the inner and outer worlds. In Sucker Punch, the outermost (or real) world is seen for about three minutes at the beginning and again for about three minutes at the end. Oddly, a middle layer in which the girl (named only Babydoll) imagines herself a prisoner not in a mental institution but in a stylish brothel serves up what little plot and characterization we have. This itself parallels with the real world and might have been interesting if we spent any time there. Instead we are propelled one after another into a series of really cool looking fantasy set pieces. Oddly, the “plan” to escape the institution (brothel, asylum — both? neither?) is broken down into a quest of five video game like steps, conveniently provided by Scott Glenn in a role known only as “The Wise Man”. Each step, which in the midworld amounts to things like: “steal a lighter from the fat-cat mayor who is visiting to have his way with the fifteen year-old hotties” is instead rendered into an “action packed” fantasy that has very very little bearing on the task. Also, this setup, which is pretty awful but intriguing is whitewashed due to a pansy PG-13 rating.

We have a big fight in a cool asian temple against three giant robo-samurai-knights. Each has his own weapon! Yah video games. This even includes a Doom-style gatling gun.

Immersion in a steampunk super-sized World War I trench battle, which honestly for about one minute took my breath away.

A return to the assault on Helm’s Deep, complete with orcs in danger of lawsuit from WETA and big fire breathing dragons (the dragon is the lighter — yeah, that’s deep connection).

And a sci-fi shootout bomb run on a super high tech train filled with killer robots. Snooze!

The first three of these, particularly the WWI fight, are gorgeous. I mean really cool looking. But they are ten-fifteen minute fight scenes with almost no dialog set to ethereal music like a version of “White Rabbit” sung by Emiliana Torrini. (NOTE: I did order the soundtrack, that part was awesome) For a minute or three each they seem intensely cool. But they’re just shooting, jumping, slicing and more shooting. We don’t know who these characters are. They’re in a dream within a dream. And we don’t care. They are shooting at thousands of horde-like video game style enemies. We don’t care. Somehow each of these fights results in achieving the fairly straightforward midworld objective. The connection is highly non-obvious.

Highly non-obvious = non-existent.

It’s also worth noting the extremely bizarre infusion of manga/game infused stylization. First of all, by including Comic book, 40s faux-gangster, Asian, WWI, Fantasy, and Sci-Fi we have a serious total complete massive buttload overabundance of style. Any one of these would have made for a highly stylized firm. Extreme too too too too muchness. But the girls in their weird “warrior schoolgirl” outfits is whacky — although I am a lover of midriff — and I could have gotten drunk taking a shot every time someone thunked down a gun in slow-mo or gotten rich with a penny for every giant CGI gun casing that flipped toward the camera. This is of the more is more school of filmmaking. Synder should have studied more closely what makes Pan’s Labyrinth a brilliant film: Two styles contrasting, with one being hyper realistic, a strong tie between the fantasy and reality planes. And most importantly: highly developed characters including one of the most terrifying genuine evil types to cross the silver screen in years.

My parents, as lifelong anglophiles and Masterpiece Theatre viewers, recommended this British TV series set in 1912-1914. It wasn’t a hard sell once I read the blurb, and I’m so glad we watched it. This is really fine television.

Downton Abbey is a fictional great English country estate, owned by the middle aged Earl of Grantham. He has a loving wife and three daughters, not to mention about 30 assorted housekeepers, maids, footmen, and the like. What he doesn’t have is an heir, as his cousin, the closest male relative went down with the Titanic. The major family drama here is the conflict between the complex English system of inheritance (and this earl’s specific case) and the circumstances. The playground is an anything but simple household that contains no less than 20 major cast members.

No show or movie I’ve ever seen before so intimately details complex organization of great estate like this. I’m always fascinated by the evolution of everyday living (for rich and poor alike) and anyone who thinks the rich keep on getting richer ought to see this. And then remember that a 100 years earlier a house like this would have had five times the servants. Also dominant are the politics and different roles of the various staff and family members. 1914 is the end of an era, as the double whammy of World War I/II will shatter the aging remains of Europe’s cast system like a crystal vase dropped off the Empire State Building (HERE for some of my thoughts on that). In any case, this series is to a large extent about this particular moment, so indicative of the long history of social change. We have employee rights, women’s franchise, choice in marriage and family, even the availability of healthcare and the installation of the telephone.

But that’s not what makes it good, merely interesting. What makes it good is the phenomenal writing and acting. Maggie Smith (younger viewers will know her better as Professor Minerva McGonagall) is a standout as the reigning Earl’s crotchety old mother, but the entire cast is great. For this many characters, they are each highly distinct and multidimensional. Some you love, some you love to hate, but they all make it entertaining. Downton Abbey is not a series about sudden murders or gratuitous brothel scenes like the great HBO dramas (and I love those too!), but instead a series of intertwined character studies that reveal their era as well as timeless facets of human nature.

So unless you thought Transformers 2 was high entertainment, go watch!

Doing research for the sequel to my novel I started reading a number of histories of World War I. This is simply put: an amazing single volume history of the war, its causes, and course of events (but not the post-treaty fallout). I’ve read hundreds (or more) of history books, and as single volume war histories go — this is excellent. I’d recommend it to anyone who wants to understand the world we live in, because the modern political arena was forged in World War I (far more than WWII). The often autocratic (or at least Imperialist) regiems of Europe were not prepared for what it really meant to bring the full might of post industrial powers into conflict. The last real shakeup of Europe had been a hundred years earlier with the Napoleonic wars, but the 19th century had remade the economies of the world. The clash, cataclysmic in terms of everything, ended the old world order. All of the big old autocratic states collapsed (Prussia, Russia, the Hapsburgs, the Ottomans) and even the winners were left unable to hold onto their empires. Meyer does a great job introducing the players gradually so as to not overburden the story of the war’s origins with background. It reads like a taut horror novel — and that’s pretty much what it is.